Semi-OT: PMac 6100 DOS

From: Marion Bates <Marion.Bates_at_dartmouth.edu>
Date: Wed Mar 13 12:27:23 2002

Chris,

Thanks for all the suggestions! See below...

--- Chris wrote:
>The PC side _seems_ to be booting up ok (I can hear faint Windows system
>beeps, and the PC Setup control panel reports that "PC is running") but I
>can't switch over. When I hit "switch to PC" the Mac's screen goes dimmer,
>the cursor disappears, and the PC Clipboard becomes the active app, but
>nothing else happens after a good 5 minutes of waiting.

In the PC Setup control panel, change the C: drive to a new drive file,
make it an brand new drive file, with nothing in it (just make a 5mb or
something). Then boot the PC. You should get a BIOS boot screen, and
eventually see a typical PC error of non system disk, replace and press a
key.
----------

Okay, did that. Same result.

----------
If you don't get that far, then the card isn't working properly. At that
point, I would verify it is installed correctly (I'm not sure if that
model card needed a video dongle or not... the Q610 "Houdini" card does,
and so does the later 586 and Pentium card, although the latter can use
an internal video cable in place of the normal external one.)
----------

I took the whole thing out and removed/reseated everything. There was one small daughterboard, a long skinny board in the PCI slot (?) and a RAM simm. The only dongles I saw were sound and CD-ROM which I also unplugged and re-plugged. Didn't see any huge scorchmarks or anything like that. ;)

Question: There is a three-row, 26-pin port on the PC card, for some external device to plug in to. What is this?

----------
After verifying the card is installed ok (fully seated, CD Audio cable is
connected, and video dongle connected if needed), and it still doesn't
boot... reinstall the Mac PC Setup software. You want version 1.5. You
can get it here
<http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html#doswin> v1.0.2
is for the Q610 card, v1.5 is for the Q630/PM6100 card, and v1.6.4 is for
the later 586/Pentium cards.
----------

Awesome, thanks for the link! Why is the corresponding Apple FTP site's folder empty then? Grrr. Made me think they'd pulled their whole software archive except for patches.

Anyway I just finished installing that, but result is the same regardless of which drive image I use. One thing I noticed, dunno if it's at all relevant, but when I try to click the popup menu for "Sharing" (this is in the PC Setup panel) it gives me the following error message: "No PC drive letters available. Make sure that "MACSHARE" has been started on the PC and "LASTDRIVE" is set to an appropriate value in your "CONFIG.SYS"." I assume this is for file sharing Mac data to the PC side, so at the moment I don't need to care about that problem...right?

----------
If is STILL doesn't boot... check to see if a ram chip is installed
directly on the DOS card. If so, remove it. The cards are very picky over
using the right chip. Remove an installed one, and then tell the PC Setup
you want to share ram with the Mac (it should default to that
automatically when it doesn't detect a chip installed).
----------

Okay, I pulled the RAM chip off. I selected the maximum amount of Mac RAM to share (32 MB) and rebooted to make that take effect. Same problem.

----------
If it STILL doesn't boot... let me know, we'll go from there. But by now,
it should at least boot to the BIOS screen.

Once you get to the BIOS screen, you can then either retry the old drive
file, or just start from scratch and install DOS or Windows. The card you
have officially supports up to Win95.
-----------

What's weird is that when I try to switch to PC, I can hear DOS beeps, and I think I am in DOS because if I blindly type dir <return>, I can hear the hard drive clicking away in response. So it appears to be a video thing...? Previous owner said that she's never used a different video cable, port, monitor, etc. before and it worked fine til recently. ?? Maybe the card, or the video portion of the card, is in fact fried. Sigh.

-----------
You should NOT have the drive file open and mounted on the Mac when you
are trying to boot from the PC. And after changing drive files in the PC
Setup control panel, you will need to reboot the PC (but not the Mac).
--- end of quote ---

Definitely do not have it mounted when I try this switch.

Thanks again for all the help...any other ideas?

-- MB
Received on Wed Mar 13 2002 - 12:27:23 GMT

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